The Outsider Perspective Issue 491 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the White House and press circus show traveling to China this week. Bret Baier and the Fox News crew spent the week in Beijing covering Trump’s three-day state visit. One day, their driver parked illegally for two minutes. A surveillance camera caught it. A $40 ticket landed on the driver’s phone before he was back in his seat at the end of the segment.

Baier did another segment from the middle of the street. He counted at least twenty cameras on one street corner. Beijing added 1,500 new ones this year alone. “They see everything,” he said into the lens. The clip went viral on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, mostly with Beijing locals complaining about the Fox crew filming in the middle of traffic.

The parking ticket is funny. The setting is not. China runs the largest surveillance network in human history. Facial recognition keyed to a national ID. Drones that track movement across cities. A social-credit system that decides whether you can buy a train ticket or rent an apartment based on whether the regime considers you a problem citizen. The Fox News crew got the lightest possible glimpse of what that system does every minute of every day to 1.4 billion people. It just happened to land on the U.S. president’s traveling press pool.

It’s the sort of communist system we need to avoid at all costs. This week I am writing about partisanship and why we need more of it. It sounds crazy, but I’ll make the case – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Progressives cannot quit the Castros. Rep. Pramila Jayapal traveled to Cuba in early April with Rep. Jonathan Jackson, met with the Díaz-Canel regime and members of parliament, and then admitted in a Seattle briefing that she had been “in conversations with the ambassadors from Mexico and some other places … trying to figure out how to get oil there.” Translation: a sitting U.S. congresswoman was working foreign embassies to help an unfriendly communist regime route around American sanctions. Now she is on Fox News defending the trip and saying she has received death threats. The death threats are wrong. The trip is also wrong. American progressives have been flying to Havana to get charmed by the Castros since the 1960s. Bernie Sanders made the Burlington-mayor pilgrimage in 1989 and praised Cuba’s “massive literacy program” on 60 Minutes three decades later. Michael Moore staged the Havana hospital scene in Sicko in 2007. The Progressive Caucus has now picked up the cause. The Cuban people walk off the island by the hundreds of thousands. The food spoils in dead refrigerators. The hospitals have no medicine. Six and a half decades of socialism produced one of the worst humanitarian situations in the Western Hemisphere, and a sitting member of Congress flew there last month to ask the dictator how she could help. It remains utterly bizarre to behold.
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Where you can find me this week

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The Democrats’ New Constitutional Rule: A Court Is Legitimate Only When It Rules Our Way – Conservative Institute

Trump Is in Beijing. The CCP Has Been in Arcadia, Albany, and a Navy Base in San Diego. – Conservative Institute

Easy Way or Hard Way: Cuba Just Got the Venezuela Letter. – Conservative Institute

In Praise of Partisanship

This week the POLITICO Poll, conducted by Public First, put the a question to Kamala Harris voters two different ways. First, 54 percent said Democrats should protect the voting power of Black voters and other minorities, even if it costs the party seats. Twenty-six percent said the opposite: they wanted to draw more Democratic seats, even if it reduces minority voting power. Twenty percent said they did not know.

Then the pollsters asked the same question with stakes attached. Voters learned that Republicans are redrawing maps across the South after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana. The poll asked Harris voters how Democrats should respond. The 26 jumped to 45. The 54 dropped to 32. The same Harris-voter sample, in the same survey, swung 22 points toward partisan map-drawing the moment partisan stakes were named.

The Democratic base does not actually believe the racial-justice frame their party has been selling for two decades. They believe in winning. The poll caught them admitting it.

That is not a scandal. That is what voters do. What is striking is that we have spent a generation pretending it was something else.

What the Poll Actually Said

Public First surveyed 2,065 U.S. adults from May 9 to May 11, 2026. The poll asked Harris voters the same trade-off two ways. The “in theory” question, asking what Democrats should do when drawing maps, produced the answer Democrats sell on television: 54 percent said protect the voting power of Black voters and other minorities, even if it costs the party seats. The “in context” question added the real-world stakes: The Supreme Court has narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans are redrawing maps across the South to dismantle majority-minority districts.

The protect-minority-voting-power answer collapsed to 32 percent. The counter-Republican-efforts answer, explicitly framed as “even if it means reducing the number of majority-minority districts,” won 45 percent.

The same voters, asked the same trade-off twice, walked to the partisan answer the moment partisan stakes were named. They swung that direction by 22 points.

Drawing maps that split a city for partisan advantage has been a Democratic specialty for at least twenty-four years. I’ve seen it in Tennessee first hand.

Democrats Did This in Memphis Twenty-Four Years Ago

In January 2002 the Tennessee General Assembly, then under Democratic control, passed and signed HB 274 — the post-2000-census congressional map. The map carved Shelby County, the urban anchor of West Tennessee that contains the city of Memphis, across three congressional districts. The 7th, the 8th, and the 9th. Democrats drew it that way on purpose.

The same map carved a new 7th district that was 200 miles long and at one point only two miles wide. It packed the Republican suburbs of Nashville and Memphis into a single seat and left the rest of the state safe for the Democratic incumbents the party wanted to protect. The 4th district was redrawn to flip from Republican Van Hilleary to Democratic state senator Lincoln Davis. Williamson County, the wealthy Republican suburb south of Nashville, was stripped out of Bart Gordon’s 6th and dumped into the already-Republican 7th to keep Gordon’s seat safe. Nashville-area precincts were added to the 6th to backfill the rural vote that Williamson took with it when it left.

That was the textbook Democratic gerrymander of 2002. Three districts cut into Memphis. A 200-mile snake across Middle Tennessee. Suburban Republicans packed and rural Democrats protected. Nobody at the time called it a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Nobody said it diluted the Black vote. Nobody asked whether the lines could be drawn to keep Shelby County intact. The Democratic Party drew the map. The Democratic press accepted it. That is what partisanship looks like when your side is doing it.

When Republicans took control of things and redid lines in 2010, they isolated Nashville and Memphis into their own districts. In 2020, Nashville finally got divided, and now, Memphis is following suit.

This week, Tennessee Republicans are splitting Shelby County back across three districts. Same county. Same maneuver. Different party drawing the lines this time. The ACLU has sued. The NAACP has sued. A federal judge set a hearing for May 20. The same outlets that ignored the 2002 map are calling the 2026 map racism.

I know what the 2002 map did because I lived under it. I worked Republican campaigns in the region from 2006 through 2010, including the 2006 GOP Senate primary on Ed Bryant’s side. I sat in the room when Bryant conceded that primary to Bob Corker. Corker beat Harold Ford Jr. that November. The Democratic legislature had redrawn Bart Gordon’s 6th in 2002 to keep his seat safe, and that was the district I lived in for years. The map Tennessee Democrats drew then was the same kind of map Tennessee Republicans are drawing now. The problem is that Republicans are the ones drawing the lines this cycle.

The complaint hides a deeper problem. Tennessee Democrats have so thoroughly isolated themselves from the state that they cannot win a Memphis-anchored district anymore. A Democrat from the 1980s or 1990s would carry these seats easily. Today’s Democratic Party cannot field a candidate who can talk to the people who live in them. That is not a lines problem. That is a Democratic Party problem (this is true in places other than just Tennessee).

At the end of the day: it’s all partisanship. It’s politicians drawling political lines.

And That Is Fine. The Founders Said So.

James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 in November 1787 to explain why the new Constitution would not be torn apart by the partisan competition every prior republic had been torn apart by. He did not pretend faction would go away. He said the opposite. “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” Madison wrote, “and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.”

I used this same Madison framework two weeks ago in this newsletter to explain why Democrats now find themselves on the wrong side of prosecutorial weapons they had built. The Federalist 10 architecture applies just as cleanly to redistricting. The most common source of faction, Madison continued, is “the various and unequal distribution of property.” A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest. They will always exist. They will always compete. “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.”

Madison did not call faction the disease of republics. He called the channeling of faction the principal task of modern legislation. Partisanship was not a problem to be solved. Partisanship was the process.

Madison considered the alternatives and dismissed them. There are two ways to remove the causes of faction, he wrote. You can destroy the liberty that produces faction, or you can give every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, the same interests. The first cure is “worse than the disease.” The second is impossible because differences in human faculties produce differences in property. So you build the system around method two: you control the effects of faction through structure.

The whole American constitutional design is the implementation of method two. The extended republic. Separation of powers. The bicameral legislature. The federal-state division. Different terms, different constituencies, different selection methods. None of it abolishes faction. All of it channels faction.

Partisanship is not the bug in the American system. Partisanship is the operating system. Every time a politician or commentator says we must rise above partisanship, they are proposing the cure Madison rejected as worse than the disease.

The Founders knew this because they had read it in older books. Madison was building an American version of an argument that goes back thousands of years.

Aristotle and Adams Got There First

Aristotle’s Politics opens with a claim about human nature. Man is by nature a political animal. The Greek phrase is zoon politikon — a creature of the polis, the city-state. Aristotle’s argument is that the polis is not an artificial imposition on free individuals. The polis is the natural completion of human nature. The household is necessary for life. The polis is necessary for the good life. A man outside the polis, Aristotle wrote, is either a beast or a god. He is not a higher form of human.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle calls politics the most authoritative art and the master art. The doctor heals. The soldier fights. The merchant trades. Politics decides which of those crafts a society needs, in what proportion, and what counts as a craft worth practicing. Aristotle’s word is that politics ordains which sciences should be studied and which each class of citizens should learn. Politics is the architecture of every other human activity.

If Aristotle is right, an apolitical expert is not a higher form of government. He is a person who has refused the master art and called the refusal a virtue.

John Adams made the American version of Aristotle’s argument in three volumes between 1787 and 1788. Adams wrote A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America during his years as the American minister in London, while the framers were drafting the Constitution back in Philadelphia. He wrote it to answer the French economist Turgot, who had argued that the new American states should adopt single-house legislatures because the English mixed-government tradition was a relic.

Adams said no. Every stable regime in human history, he wrote, has balanced three elements: the one, the few, and the many. The executive principle, the aristocratic principle, the popular principle. In England the king, the lords, and the commons. In America the presidency, the senate and the courts, and the House and state legislatures. Mix these three through institutional structure and you get stability. Concentrate any one of them and you get the same outcome every time. The tyranny of a king. The tyranny of an oligarchy. The tyranny of the mob. Adams pulled the argument straight out of Polybius and Plato and walked his readers through two thousand years of historical examples to make it stick. He named partisanship directly: “All nations, under all governments, must have parties; the great secret is to control them. There are but two ways, either by a monarchy and standing army, or by a balance in the constitution.”

The American constitutional design is Adams’s argument made structural. Three branches. Two houses. State and federal layers. Different terms, different constituencies, different methods of selection. All of it built so no single faction could capture the whole.

The Wilsonian project ignores the entire Western tradition on this point. So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So does the redistricting-commissions movement. They are not arguing against partisanship. They are arguing against the one architecture that has ever channeled it without destroying liberty.

The Honest Partisan Tells You What He Wants. AOC Does the Opposite.

In 1992 James Carville taped a sign to the wall of the Clinton war room in Little Rock. The sign had three lines. The middle line was “the economy, stupid.” Carville told campaign staff to hammer the economy at every chance they got. He was a partisan working a winning strategy. He told the country what he was doing while he was doing it. Democrats won that November. Today’s Republicans face the same midterm reality. Inflation is the issue. The economy is the issue. The honest partisan says so out loud and runs on it.

When I write that inflation will drive the 2026 midterms, I sound like Carville. That is the point. Carville is a partisan being honest about reality. That is a virtue, not a vice.

On April 23, 2026, Virginia Democrats had just won a redistricting referendum at the ballot box. A reporter asked AOC about Republican complaints. Her answer:

“Oh, wah, wah, wah.”

“Listen, Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering, and for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set. And so if the Republican Party wanted to start this, they did this in North Carolina. They drew out three Democratic members of Congress in North Carolina. They drew out in Texas. They re-did Texas.”

That is a partisan crowing. I have no problem with this. It is what partisans do when they win.

Two weeks later, the Virginia Supreme Court (a state court, not the United States Supreme Court) struck the referendum down on a 4-3 ruling. AOC’s frame changed:

“This court overturned the will of three million Virginians.”

The same partisan, reading the same week. When Democrats won, the Republicans were sore losers. When the court called the win back, the court was illegitimate.

Her constitutional claim is wrong on the merits. Three things to know about the Virginia Supreme Court ruling.

First, Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution requires an intervening general election between the General Assembly’s first and second approvals of any constitutional amendment. The General Assembly held its first vote on October 31, 2025. By that date, more than 1.3 million Virginians had already cast early ballots in the 2025 House of Delegates general election that was supposed to ratify them. The court found that 1.3 million voters had been denied their constitutionally protected opportunity to elect the House that would participate in the second vote. The legislature voted on the amendment after the voters who were supposed to weigh in on the legislators were already at the polls.

Second, local officials failed to publish the 90-day notice the constitution requires.

Third, the court did not invent a new map. It restored the bipartisan redistricting commission that Virginia voters had originally established by constitutional amendment in 2020.

The legislature broke the constitutional amendment process to impose a new map on voters whose elected delegates had not yet been chosen. The court enforced the rules the voters themselves wrote. AOC’s “will of three million Virginians” is the inverse of what happened. It is Democrats who are trying to disenfranchise voters.

Carville says he wants Democrats to win on the economy. AOC says she wants to defend the will of the voters. Both are running partisan strategies. Only one of them is being honest about it.

The Wilsonian Project Broke This — and Wilson Told Us He Was Doing It

The argument against partisanship in modern America does not begin with AOC. It begins with Woodrow Wilson in 1887. Wilson was a Princeton political scientist at the time, twenty-five years before he was elected president of the United States. The essay he published in Political Science Quarterly that summer is the foundational text of the modern administrative state.

Wilson “argued that administrative powers were extraconstitutional and need not be bound by the checks and balances and separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution.”

Wilson’s first move was to separate politics from administration. “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” he wrote. “Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.”

That sentence is the foundation of every independent agency that came after it. The Federal Reserve. The FCC. The SEC. The FTC. The FDA. The CFPB. The EPA. Politics sets the tasks. Politics should not “manipulate the offices.” The offices are professional, scientific, expert. The voter and the elected official should be kept at arm’s length from the agency’s daily work.

Wilson then asked what stood in the way of building such a system in America. His answer was direct:

“Well, principally, popular sovereignty. It is harder for democracy to organize administration than for monarchy. The very completeness of our most cherished political successes in the past embarrasses us. We have enthroned public opinion; and it is forbidden us to hope during its reign for any quick schooling of the sovereign in executive expertness or in the conditions of perfect functional balance in government.”

The founder of the modern administrative state called popular sovereignty the obstacle to good government. Not a feature to be channeled. An obstacle to be worked around.

He continued. “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” And: “In order to make any advance at all we must instruct and persuade a multitudinous monarch called public opinion — a much less feasible undertaking than to influence a single monarch called a king.” Wilson wished he were dealing with a king.

He compared the voter to a homeowner who hires a cook. “Self-government does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking dinner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.” The voter is the homeowner. The bureaucrat is the cook. The cook decides what is for dinner. The homeowner is told to trust the cook.

Wilson was explicit about where he was importing this model from. “It has been developed by French and German professors,” he wrote, “and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government.” He cited Hegel approvingly. The editor’s footnote at Teaching American History names what Wilson was citing — Hegel’s defense of the Prussian bureaucratic state as the rational endpoint of historical development. Wilson was not hiding what he was doing. He was importing the Prussian bureaucratic ideal and asking the American republic to adopt it.

One last passage. “Directly exercised, in the oversight of the daily details and in the choice of the daily means of government, public criticism is of course a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.” The voter as a rustic. The administrative state as delicate machinery. The voter must be kept away from the gears.

The administrative state Americans live under today is the project Wilson described. The framers built a system to channel partisanship through structure. Wilson built a system to insulate administration from voters. Those are not the same project. They are opposing projects. We have been running the second one on top of the first for a hundred and thirty-nine years.

Robert Moses Is What Wilson Actually Built. Obama Called It the Model.

Robert Moses ran New York City for forty-four years without ever standing for election. He held simultaneous appointments (at his peak more than a dozen) across state and city authorities that gave him control of every major piece of infrastructure in the metropolitan area. Bridges. Tunnels. Parkways. Public housing. Beaches. Parks. He served under six governors, from Al Smith to Nelson Rockefeller, and through the tenures of every New York City mayor from John Hylan to John Lindsay. He answered to no voter. He could not be fired by any mayor or governor he outlasted. He did not have to win an argument with the public. He had to win an argument with the people who appointed him to which board, and he was usually the man who had drafted the legislation creating the board.

Robert Caro spent seven years writing The Power Broker (1974) to explain how this was possible in a constitutional republic. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and remains the single best case study of what the Wilsonian project produces when an actual person picks up Wilson’s prescription and runs with it. It produces a forty-four-year unelected reign over the country’s largest city. The cook gets the kitchen. The homeowner gets dinner. The homeowner is not asked.

Barack Obama treated Caro’s biography of Moses as a guidebook for how American power actually works. He absorbed the lesson and acted on it. He saw the Moses-style accumulation of administrative authority as the path American government would have to take in the twenty-first century. In January 2014, at the first cabinet meeting of his second term, he laid the framework out plain:

“We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”

The pen and the phone. The president told the country he intended to govern by executive action when Congress would not move. The instinct was the same as the one Wilson described in 1887 and the one Moses lived for forty-four years. Politics has set the tasks. Now the executive will manage the offices. The voters and the legislators they elected can read about it later.

Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers sees this as an abomination. The whole point of the constitutional design is that no person should hold the power Robert Moses held. The whole point of separation of powers is that the cook and the homeowner are the same citizen, and the citizen votes.

When Wilson wrote the prescription in 1887, you could believe he was describing a small, technical class of trained civil servants. Robert Moses showed what the prescription becomes when an actual person picks it up. Obama showed what the prescription becomes when the president of the United States adopts it as his governing posture. That is not an abuse of the model. That is the model working as designed.

We Need More Partisanship. Not Less.

A partisan tells you what he wants. A partisan can be voted out. A partisan can be argued with. The partisan is the only operator in the American constitutional system who carries skin in the game — every two years he stands at the ballot box and the people he has been working for or against decide whether to send him back. The framers built every other operator in the system to check him. They did not build the system to abolish him. He is the unit of operation. He is the engine.

The alternatives sold for a century now — redistricting commissions, independent agencies, expert panels, blue-ribbon study groups, “good-government” reform packages — every one of them is sold as a way to take partisanship out of a piece of government. Every one of them in fact lodges political power with people who do not have to face voters. The agency staffer keeps her job whichever party wins the next election. The commissioner cannot be fired by the governor she embarrasses. The expert does not have to defend a bad call at a town hall. There is no version of the technocratic project that takes the politics out. There are only versions that move the politics to actors who answer to no one.

This is why the Politico poll matters. Half the Harris-voter base, when asked the question with the stakes attached, walked to the partisan answer. They were being honest about what they actually want — Democrats winning seats. The dishonest move would have been to pretend the racial-justice frame was the deepest commitment. Half of them refused to pretend. What we know is this: if Black voters flipped to Republicans, those protected district beliefs would vanish altogether.

The Founders did not hide partisanship behind credentials. They named it, sized it, and built the architecture to channel it. Federalist No. 10 is not a hand-wringing essay about the danger of faction. It is a structural argument that faction is the latent cause sown in human nature and the wise constitution-builder works with it, not around it. AOC, Wilson, the redistricting-commissions movement, the agencies, the experts — all of them are running a different project. Theirs is the project Madison rejected as worse than the disease.

The American republic was built to run on partisanship channeled through structure. We have spent a century trying to run it on credentialed administrators insulated from voters. The first system gave us the longest-running constitutional democracy on earth. The second gave us Robert Moses. We need more partisanship. Not less.